In Search of Good Government

by Laura Tingle

  The second is that a deal-maker, by nature, tends to be responding to events rather than shaping them. One-off deals also tend not to lend themselves to a broad strategic direction.

  If someone else in the cabinet was working behind the scenes, helping set a political and policy strategy, “he could be left to be a mind-bogglingly good deal-maker,” our jaded observer notes. “But it is mostly Malcolm alone.”

  Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister

  In the public service, as in the corporate world, there are long-established frameworks for assessing people you think might rise up the ranks into positions of leadership. They are expected to shape strategic thinking, achieve results, exemplify personal drive and integrity, cultivate productive working relationships, and communicate with influence (with this last one being rather important for a politician).

  “If you ran Malcolm through the federal public service’s leadership capability framework, you would find he has none of the leadership qualities we demand of bureaucrats,” a long-time Canberra insider observes.

  If we try to align this with Turnbull’s own definition of the task facing him in September 2015, his failings would be that he hasn’t learnt to communicate with influence and “explain the challenges and how to seize the opportunities.” Nor has he been able to provide the economic leadership that people took him to be talking about: to restart or redefine the economic debate.

  It is true that few of our former political leaders were strong in all these skills. But they usually mastered a few.

  A less harsh assessment of Turnbull would suggest that he has spent considerable time investing in achieving results (if not always getting a pay-off), exemplifying integrity (in seeking to win the trust of his colleagues) and in cultivating productive working relationships.

  On this last point, he has perhaps been most successful (particularly given a track record of broken relationships with former partners in his business life). A small team of senior cabinet ministers has gradually built up around the prime minister: Mathias Cormann, Peter Dutton, Barnaby Joyce, Arthur Sinodinos, George Brandis, Christopher Pyne, Josh Frydenberg, Greg Hunt, Simon Birmingham.

  They may have their own agendas – as politicians always do. But there is a sense of shared purpose: to get the government and the prime minister to the next election. The government has an effective negotiating team in the Senate, and Cormann and Dutton as the most senior leaders of the party’s right form a crucial support base for the PM.

  “Cabinet is cohesive but what is hurting [Turnbull] is ill-discipline across the broader team,” one cabinet minister notes. “That includes everyone from marginal-seat backbenchers to former cabinet ministers.”

  Turnbull has built good relationships with the key crossbench senators, who say he will always take their call. Backbenchers approvingly note they can get access to his office. At some points, Bill Shorten has been surprised to have Turnbull ring him to discuss a political dilemma.

  The glaring problem relationship, though, is the one with his treasurer, Scott Morrison. When it comes to the budget, or even to Senate strategy, it can sometimes seem that the two men are not talking about the same thing. The prime minister might be pushing equity; the treasurer will come out and talk growth.

  Most famously, there was the car crash over tax reform in the early days of the Turnbull prime ministership. And within Parliament House, it is still the episode – along with the question of whether Turnbull should have gone straight to the polls after he became leader – that gets workshopped the most.

  Morrison famously did the “front-running” on tax reform. He was gung-ho to have a big package of changes, including an increased GST.

  Turnbull blinked.

  How could there be such a misunderstanding between the two most senior figures in the government?

  “The problem is,” one source says, “Malcolm thinks in draft until he reaches a firm conclusion. Particularly in the early days, people were interpreting ‘Hmmm …’ as a green light. All of a sudden you have positions splashed across the front page.

  “He has had to learn to say to people, ‘We’re just testing the idea here. We’re just discussing the principles.’”

  Morrison, by comparison, tends to be a bit more, er, linear. “That’s why he was so good in Immigration,” the same source observes. “There’s a simple message, a black-and-white proposition. But he struggles more when you have to come up with a nuanced thread.” As of course you have to do all the time as treasurer.

  In all the replays about the early election option, people around Turnbull come back to the point that there were too many unresolved issues for them to go to the polls.

  Tax reform? People seem to forget that it is up to the states to say how much the GST might be lifted, and where the money it raises goes. Good luck with the prospect that there would have been agreement on this – despite the attempts to be helpful from Jay Weatherill and others – if the states and Labor knew that a Coalition election platform relied on it.

  Turnbull has made arguments about why the GST shouldn’t be increased. “I know a lot of people will say, ‘You should just increase the GST and then use it to cut company tax, or give it to the states,’” he said in March.

  “The problem with raising the GST is that because so many Australians are not in the tax net, by the time you have kept the bottom and second bottom quintile – so the bottom 40 per cent of households by income – compensated so that they are not materially worse off, you have very relatively little money left.

  “That is one clear objection. So the idea that there is this one huge easy pot of gold to grab simply does not stack up. That’s why we rejected it as a proposal last year, and that is the flaw in the argument.”

  (Of course, there is actually another point here. The awful truth is that the budget situation, the very issue of budget consolidation, really means that not everyone should be fully compensated for an increase in the GST. We are not just talking about a tax-mix switch here. But nobody will say this out loud.)

  Perhaps the ultimate test of a problem-solving prime minister should be: does he solve problems?

  Cabinet ministers defending their boss proffer a range of tricky problems – many of which you may have forgotten or not known about – that Turnbull has resolved. There was a conflict over water for South Australia. The re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. The disputes over independent truck drivers and volunteer firefighters. Achieving at least some reform of the Senate (however contentious). Finding a partial solution – or a path to one – that may eventually facilitate a way out of Manus Island and Nauru.

  A lot of the Turnbull solutions have a frustratingly unfinished quality to them. Take the “solution” to the impasse over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act or the issue of same-sex marriage.

  Delving back into his time as a minister in the Howard and Abbott governments, there are conflicting views of the success of two signature policy issues: reforming the water market and implementing the National Broadband Network. The critics argue that while Turnbull does a good job of talking the economics or the technology, he often actually blinds people with science.

  On water, for example, he saw it as a demand problem, when in fact it was a supply issue.

  More pragmatic defenders say, yes, there may have been a lot that was wrong with his water deal, “but it got us over the line.”

  Turnbull’s hotchpotch technology-neutral NBN (which has uncanny resonances with the technology-neutral energy debate at present) might also have a lot of critics. But, the argument goes, he managed to keep the NBN alive when Abbott had sworn to get rid of it altogether.

  Similarly, the compromises Turnbull made as Opposition leader in 2009 with the then Labor government to get the carbon pollution reduction scheme over the line also turned it into a mishmash. But if it had got through the parliament, the argument goes, you could then have used Treasury and the Productivity Commission to “kno
ck the warts off” the scheme over time.

  None of this explains some of the inexplicably bad policy positions the Coalition government has locked itself into, in what has often looked like a moment of brain-snapping blind panic.

  Some examples? Well, without doubt the worst was ruling out an emissions intensity scheme for the energy sector – a policy that had been carefully kept alive as an option through the worst of the Abbott Ground Zero years.

  There was ruling out doing anything on housing tax arrangements. By all means, the Coalition might make an argument it didn’t want to touch negative gearing (even if Labor’s position had left it the room to do so). But why rule out changes to capital gains? It just looked pathetic.

  We come back to the anarchy that rolls through the Coalition and that Turnbull is unable to ever quite deal with. The day after he got (or half-got) his company tax cuts through the Senate, the prime minister told the Victorian Liberal Party that “Menzies rejected the populism, the authoritarianism of both left and right. He knew that the future … was in the sensible centre; was in the politics, not reactionary, but liberal, proudly liberal. Above all, you build from the centre, bringing people together, and that is our commitment.”

  It sounded as much a plea as a statement.

  For it is not at all clear what lies at the “sensible centre” of Australian politics anymore. All the fundamental planks of policy that shaped much of our politics over the past three decades have been smashed in recent times.

  Is there a consensus on climate change? No. Is there a consensus on the role of government? No.

  We may have had almost two decades now of post–9/11 terror and global security fears. But there is more recent and profoundly unnerving uncertainty. We quietly look askance at our most trusted ally, with the rise of Donald Trump, and at what is happening in our region, and these are new things to contemplate for an Australian prime minister.

  This is not a period for orthodoxy, one policy-maker observes. And that makes it hard to set out any vision for the future. Bureaucrats say that Turnbull has stopped the rot in the policy-making process and tried to bring rigour and method to it.

  Others observe that the problem he has with people’s huge expectations is replicated in other countries: in the US with Obama, in India with Narendra Modi, in Canada with Justin Trudeau.

  “People project onto him what they want,” one source says. “There are contradictory expectations. The public and the media deluded themselves that he could change the nature of his party, but it is still split between moderates and conservatives. In the Menzies era, it was anchored in the idea of small business. The split is now on more contentious issues. It used to be economics issues that were the points of division. Now it is the social ones.”

  So we have a flawed prime minister, constrained by a party that is not interested in resolving its divisions, and with a problem-solving approach that, one by one, deals with issues with responses of varying quality. His issue-by-issue approach, though, makes it difficult to construct an overall strategy.

  He does not lead a great or inspirational government. He can argue it has made the parliament work more effectively than its predecessor.

  It is not a disastrous or awful or embarrassing government. However, if it continues as it is, it will almost certainly be defeated at the next election.

  What are Turnbull’s options?

  While budgets don’t have the punching power they once had to change the political narrative, this year’s loomed as a crucial opportunity for the prime minister and his government to make people take a second look at them.

  As the budget preparations continued through April, ministers were hoping that the mix would include policies that addressed not just the hot-button issues of the economy – like housing affordability – but the role of government itself.

  If the budget were to contain clear statements about the way the Coalition sees its role in areas such as education, health and basic infrastructure for our booming cities, it might help change the prism through which people view it from one of ideological conflict to one more in tune with voters’ desires.

  Physical infrastructure, in particular, is something that voters can grasp as a tangible achievement.

  In turn, if the conversation changed from “things the government is arguing about” to “things the government is doing,” there would be more scope to shift quietly back towards the centre.

  That was the hope, anyway.

  At some point, Turnbull’s colleagues will have to consider whether they share some of the responsibility for the government’s fortunes, or whether it really can be sheeted home to one person.

  Since John Howard was unceremoniously booted out of his seat in 2007, we’ve seen several prime ministers try different approaches to straddling the collapse of the old political order and policy orthodoxies. None has really worked.

  Part of the collapse of the older order that has seen prime ministers become so vulnerable, and so utterly dominant in the day-to-day assessments of politics, is the gradual erosion in stable votes for the major parties.

  Most of the conversation about this focuses on the Senate crossbench. But it is just as important in the way it affects the psychology of the major parties as they contemplate their prospects of winning majority government in the future.

  The major parties have two possibilities to explore here, both of which hold out the promise of their salvation, and, more importantly, ours.

  The first is for the major parties to recognise they are killing themselves, and enabling the minor parties, with their ongoing hard-line attacks on each other and their refusal to find the points of compromise that voters yearn for.

  The second sounds more radical but is also a live possibility and involves a transformation in the way we see minority government.

  Many voters greeted Australia’s brief dalliance with minority government between 2010 and 2013 with horror, unnerved by a sense of the instability of the arrangement. But given how unstable things seem these days, even with the majority governments of Abbott and Turnbull, the next stage of our political evolution may actually lie in minority government.

  In countries from Norway to New Zealand, changes in politics or changes in voting systems have seen minority government become a permanent feature of the political landscape. New Zealand’s political parties have had to strike very different negotiating arrangements, and accept that they have to work together, long before policy options come up in the parliament. The result is pragmatism rather than “oppositionism,” and New Zealand has been able to continue to remake itself, even as Australia’s capacity to conduct a grown-up debate about almost anything has stalled.

  It may just be that in our disillusion with the major parties we are preparing the ground that forces them to resurrect themselves.

  Whether we can give up our love affair with the prime ministerial soap opera, however, is another question.

  Sources

  POLITICAL AMNESIA

  93“When after the destruction” and “when Pompeius was”: Tacitus, The Annals, Book I, 1.2.

  103“seeing health, education” and “These areas are”: Pradeep Philip, speech delivered to the Trans-Tasman Business Circle in Melbourne, 28 July 2015.

  104“Public servants”: John Stone, quoted in Age, 25 November 1982.

  106“I think many”: Ken Henry to author, June 2015.

  106–07“The blurring of boundaries”: Martin Parkinson to author, July 2015.

  111“Progress, far from” and “Fanaticism consists”: George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense, Volume 1 of The Life of Reason, 1905–06.

  116–17“‘the new mandarins’” and subsequent quotes: Nicholas Brown, The Seven Dwarfs and the Age of the Mandarins, Australian National University Press, 2015.

  117–18“The Prime Minister of the day” and subsequent quotes: Don Russell, Reflections on My Time in Canberra, Crawford School lecture, 31 March 2014.

  120“A detailed secret
brief”: Interview with Hawke era official, September 2015.

  121“I want a strong” and “The situation was”: Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty, 1992, p. 59.

  123“scientific management”: John Nethercote, “Australian public administration in perspective”, APS Commission occasional paper.

  124“the Department”: The Auditor-General, Commonwealth Estate Property Sales – Department of Finance and Administration, Audit Report No. 4, 2001–2002 Performance Audit, Commonwealth of Australia, 2001.

  130–31“famously warned”: Gary Banks, Evidence-based policy making: What is it? How do we get it? ANU Public Lecture Series, presented by ANZSOG, Canberra, February 2009.

  132“The history of megaprojects”: Malcolm Turnbull, speech to the AFR Infrastructure Summit, 11 June 2015.

  133–34“more challenging and interesting work”: See: Alan Mitchell, “Time to end out- sourcing and rebuild the public service”, Australian Financial Review, 14 June 2015.

  134“so that there”: Korda Mentha Forensic, National Disability Insurance Agency, Review of Board Requirements, December 2014.

  136“Aboriginal Industry”: Noel Pearson, “Remote Control: Ten years of struggle and success in indigenous Australia”, Monthly, May 2015.

  138“blind spots”, “excessive focus” and “internal and external”: Department of Health, Capability Review, Commonwealth of Australia, October 2014.

  139–40“now faces” and “The Canberra Times”: Noel Towell, “Department faces biggest APS executive exodus in three decades”, Canberra Times, 23 July 2015.

  142“So only about”: Verona Burgess, “Well-functioning Australian government a distant memory for most public servants”, Australian Financial Review, 19 August 2015.

  144–45“It is clear” and “We need a”: Malcolm Turnbull, Doorstop interview, Canberra, 14 September 2015.

  146“fixed by a”: Economist, “Stabbed in the Front”, 19 September 2015.